Wordless Wednesday: The Monkey on Afghanistan's Back

Photographer John Moore took this shot for Getty Images, one of many painfully evocative images from Afghanistan's Korengal Valley collected by the Boston Globe's Big Picture earlier this month: The monkey is a mascot for American soldiers in a part of Afghanistan that has seen some of the heaviest fighting between Western and Taliban troops. The shot also sums up the minefield Barack Obama is stepping into. Afghanistan and Pakistan, not Iraq, will be the monkey on the back of American foreign policy. Too bad Hillary Clinton doesn't speak Pashtun or Dari. No secretary of state who doesn't speak Afghans' language, literally and metaphorically, is likely to succeed where foreigners have been failing since the Doric days of Alexander the Great.